Hesmondhalgh - Cultural and Creative industries
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2008). Cultural and Creative industries. In T. Bennett (ed.), The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis , (552-569). SAGE Publishing.
The term cultural industries has been circulating in cultural analysis and policy for many years and has more recently been joined by another version of the same phrase: creative industries. There is understandable confusion about the relationships between the two terms, and an objective of this chapter is to reduce bewilderment in this area. To address such questions is more than just an exercise in semantics, however. The two phrases emerge from quite different theoretical lineages and policy contexts. And, for all the considerable difficulties of scope and definition that they raise, it is clear that both concepts refer to a domain that no serious cultural analysis can afford to ignore: how cultural goods are produced and disseminated in modern economies and societies.Asecond objective of this chapter is linked to the importance of that domain. The author aims to assess how various theoretical traditions associated with these terms understand the relations between culture and economy, and between meaning and production. His main claims are that the term ‘creative industries’ represents a refusal of the forms of critical analysis associatedwith the cultural industries approach, and that unqualified use of the former now signals a considerable degree of accommodation with neoliberalism. But simply to accuse creative industries policy of complicity with neoliberalism is not enough. How might we critique creative industries policy and its theoretical underpinnings?
David Hesmondhalgh “Cultural and Creative Industries”